Today we're announcing that CData Connect AI is a featured MCP (Model Context Protocol) launch partner in the Databricks Marketplace to enable Agent Bricks. Together, enterprises can build and deploy AI agents with governed, auditable access to every business system faster than ever before.
Why this partnership matters
As organizations race to implement AI agents that can automate complex business processes, they face a critical challenge: connecting these agents to diverse enterprise data sources with the reliability, security, and intelligence required for production deployment.
Databricks Agent Bricks has delivered sophisticated AI agents for enterprises at scale. While these agents already use the full knowledge from a company's Databricks to understand and analyze data, now they can access real-time business systems and connect to external systems that are otherwise difficult to reach.
Connect AI addresses this as the industry's only managed MCP platform designed specifically for enterprise AI. AI agents need the ability to understand and act on real-time data for highly accurate analysis based on comprehensive information with the latest updates from the source.
Connect AI delivers instant, governed access to live data across 350+ enterprise systems through production-grade connectors with built-in intelligence, governance, and compliance features. Your agents can access real-time pipeline status in Salesforce, active support tickets in ServiceNow, current inventory levels in NetSuite, and hundreds of other operational data sources. More importantly, they can now take action — actually updating opportunity stages, creating tickets, adjusting forecasts, and executing workflows across all these systems with one infrastructure.
The complete AI data ecosystem: Databricks meets live data
While Databricks provides the foundation for historical data, Connect AI extends Agent Bricks' reach into the operational present. This isn't about choosing between analytical and operational data — it's about giving your agents comprehensive visibility. Now, agents can analyze trends in Databricks while simultaneously checking current inventory levels, updating live customer records, and triggering real-time workflows.
Agents built on Databricks with Connect AI's independent data layer can better reason and more accurately act on comprehensive business context. The Connect AI platform uniquely exposes the business knowledge encoded in every enterprise system — not just the data itself, but the metadata, relationships, and business logic native to each system. Agents aren't just accessing data; they're using the best available connectors built and maintained by CData to understand data with business context.
This combination of Databricks' powerful agent platform and Connect AI's comprehensive connectivity means you can deploy agents that analyze with optimal accuracy using full business context.
The power of governed, semantic-rich MCP connectivity for agents
Connect AI delivers on enterprise-grade MCP connectivity through five critical capabilities that successful AI deployments need:
Universal connectivity: Production-grade connectors to 350+ enterprise systems. Unlike point-to-point integrations or custom-built MCP servers, Connect AI provides a unified, governed connectivity layer that scales across your entire AI ecosystem.
Real-time data access: Live connections ensure agents use current states rather than stale batch exports, enabling timely decisions and actions. Your agents work with what's happening now, not what happened yesterday. This complements Databrick's strength organizing historical data for trends over time.
Semantic intelligence: Deep understanding of connected systems' schemas, relationships, and business logic that enables AI agents to perform sophisticated cross-system analysis previously impossible, consuming fewer tokens by focusing on what it's good at: building thinking chains, not exploring, configuring, and querying datasets.
Enterprise-grade security: Every action flows through Connect AI's governed control plane, ensuring complete auditability and compliance. The platform extends Databricks Unity Catalog permissions to all connected systems with CData, meaning agents automatically respect existing user access controls. If a user doesn't have permission to modify certain records in Salesforce, neither do their agents. Row-level security, field-level permissions, and comprehensive audit logs ensure that AI automation doesn't mean giving up control. With SOC2, GDPR, and ISO/IEC 27001 certification, Connect AI provides the enterprise-grade security and compliance that IT and security teams require.
Read and write MCP capabilities: Your agents don't just understand context from systems — they can write back with full governance and control. When an agent identifies a deal at risk, it can update the opportunity stage in Salesforce. When it detects a compliance issue, it can create a high-priority ticket in ServiceNow. When demand signals shift, it can adjust inventory levels in NetSuite.
Getting started with Connect AI on Agent Bricks
Visit the Databricks Marketplace and start a 14-day free trial of Connect AI. In minutes, you could have agents connected to your enterprise business systems ready to work.
For more details about this partnership and additional executive perspectives, read the full official press release.
